


The Joys of Baking

by PrincessDesire



Series: College Boyfriends [5]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Fluff, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25640986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDesire/pseuds/PrincessDesire
Summary: Hux can't bake and Millicent is wearing a lot of flour.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Series: College Boyfriends [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738783
Comments: 11
Kudos: 42





	The Joys of Baking

Hux’s first mistake had been trying to bake instead of just buying the damn birthday cake. He’s no Gordon Ramsay, no Rachel Ray, but he’d thought that he could handle the not-incredibly challenging task of cracking eggs and measuring teaspoons of vanilla. He hadn’t known one missed ingredient could make that big of a difference on a recipe. He definitely hadn’t known that oven rack placement could turn half of a golden fluffy cake into a shriveled briquette. His third attempt was going to be the sweet spot, pun intended but not actually voiced aloud for judgmental ears. It might have been too, but that’s where Hux’s second mistake came into play, leaving all the unused ingredients unattended while fetching his ringing cellphone. 

The crash that followed was the sound of gravity asserting its dominance over various cooking pans and ingredients and that leads him to the situation he’s in now, eggs cracked on the floor, bag of flour creating snow banks on the kitchen floor, and there, there in the center of the mayhem, the culprit herself: the fat princess of mayhem, Millicent. 

Millicent should be orange. Now she’s the same shade as a Scooby-Doo ghost, white particles dusting the tips of her fur. She’s licking at one of the cracked eggs, eyes glancing nervously up as she does, intuiting Hux’s impending intervention. 

Hux doesn’t often raise his voice, a small miracle considering his choice in life partners. This time, it reaches a near Brendol-finding-out-his-son-is-gay volume. “Millicent! What have you done?”

She cowers, but the small pink of her tongue doesn’t stop in its attempt to lap up the sticky albumen ruining the kitchen floor.

He snatches a spatula from the counter and takes a step towards her, an urge to violence compelling him forward. She does run then, having spotted the weapon and the crazed look in his eyes. She kicks up a white trail of flour behind her, like the dust trail behind a cartoon character, as she slides between the counter and the trash can, guilty orange and white tail still visible from the crevice. 

“Yeah, you’d better run, you stupid cat!” He yells at the tail.

Ren makes his entrance then. He looks around with large surprised eyes at the mess of a kitchen before noting the spatula in Hux’s hand and his obviously enraged state. One of Ren's large, muscular shoulders touches the doorway and he leans against it with the largest schadenfreude smile creeping across his wicked face.

Hux could kill him. 

“Don’t just stand there laughing like a clown. Do you see the mess she’s made?”

The taunt comes not from Ben’s lips but from his eyes. “Your cat, your mess,” they say, and they’re right, damn him. Right now Hux wants to sell the beast, throw it out a window. Instead, he slaps the spatula hard on the counter. “Dammit!” The tail moves the rest of the way into the gap where she can no longer be seen. 

“This is all for you, you know. You could take a little pity on me.” Hux pouts. He’s been living with Ren too long. One moment was too long, he suspects, doomed to become more petulant and prone to anger fits the instant he let Ren’s plush lips touch his own. It's like a disease.

“Why didn’t you just  _ buy _ me a cake?” 

“That’s the question of the day, isn’t it?” Hux mutters. He’d been feeling domestic the day the idea had popped into his head. They were watching an episode of their favorite show, dinner plates tucked away in the drying rack already, Millicent purring happily on his chest, and Ren rubbing his feet. He’d been tricked by the loving familial atmosphere into thinking that maybe he could be a white picket fence man after all, that just because he generally had the emotional range of a menhir, that didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t have a happily ever after. 

He plops the spatula in the sink with a sigh.

Stepping on one spot of floor not currently coated in unbaked cake components, Ren’s arm can just reach Hux’s waist, which he grips with easy proprietorship. “I think it might be because you love me,” says Ren in his softer tone, the one he gets when he’s feeling romantic. 

“Well, obviously it can’t be that,” retorts Hux, but he doesn’t move away from the hand. He allows it pull him in, his feet already gross with flour and egg. It’s disgusting, and he won’t be able to think straight until this whole mess is clean.

Ren grabs his chin and tilts it upwards, stares down at him. “I’d offer to help, but you’re going to complain about the job I do, anyway. So, how about this, you wash the kitchen, and I’ll wash Millie.”

It’s an astoundingly generous offer. “You do realize that cats don’t like baths, right?” he asks. 

“I believe I’ve heard that before, yeah.” He’s paused to be offended if Hux says one more thing implicating his potential lack of knowledge; Ren can be hypersensitive around things that make him feel stupid. Hux knows this, and anyway, has no intention of pushing against the offer a second time. He nods, letting Ren give him a brief kiss before separating. “Okay, Millicent. I want you to remember that I am much stronger than you, and can be very dangerous.”

He extracts the flour-dusted cat by the back of the neck, as he has seen Hux do when putting her in her carrier for the vet. She looks a bit like a large, tailed powdered donut. She growls, but doesn’t resist, as Ren leaves the kitchen for their bathtub. 

Hux should really give the poor man some tips, but then, he’s reminded of the shit-eating grin, and he instead sets to cleaning. He sweeps and takes a cloth to all the non-floor surfaces. He washes the dishes, puts away the ingredients, and mops. Finally removing his filthy socks and giving them a quick rinse before popping them into the laundromat bag. Everything is back to as sparkling as an on-campus kitchen can get, and he nods with a bit of pride at it.

He finds Ren in the bedroom. His hair is wet and dripping onto a terry cloth robe, black with a hood like he liked. He’s sitting in the middle of the bed, back to the door, laptop monitor aglow in an otherwise dim room. Over his shoulder, Hux reads the Google search: cat scratch fever. 

“Did the bathing go as well as my cooking attempt?” asks Hux bending down to see some of Ren’s scowling face. 

“I’m fine,” Ren lies, pulling the robe tighter around him. 

Now it’s Hux’s turn to smile at his boyfriend’s misery, and he seizes it as eagerly as he always does. “Show me.”

“No.” 

“Where’s Millie?” asks Hux. He doesn’t see her around them.

“Under the bed.”

Hux flips the light on in the room and looks under the bed. Millie’s fur is soaking wet and she’s wearing an identical miserable pout to Ren’s; yes, definitely a contagious quality. She glares at Hux as though it was he that had ruined her dessert. “You deserve it,” he chides, before rising back up and touching Ren’s shoulders. “Would you like me to put some ointment on it?”

“No.” 

Hux turns to leave. No point staying when Ren’s in this kind of mood. Before he’s fully out of the room though, Ren adds, “Next time, I’m not offering to help.”

“Well, next time I won’t try and do anything thoughtful,” snaps Hux. He must have been insane to have tried it this time. It’s better if the grand gestures are made by his big doof of a boyfriend; they end about as well as this had, but at least they’re used to the mistakes going that direction. 

“You’re as mean as your cat,” says Ren.

Hux isn’t sure if they’re actually fighting or not. He returns to Ren’s back, kisses the back of the wet black hair. “Thanks for cleaning Millie.”

Ren cranes his neck upwards, strains his lips at Hux’s. Kissing Ren is his third favorite thing to do in the bedroom, and his fifth favorite thing to do period. He has not told Ren this, as he feels that his boyfriend might not take the news well that his kisses have come in behind receiving a new quarter’s syllabus. 

After the kiss, and he supposes the apology, Ren shows him his owies, hamming up his wounds as though they were earned in battle. He ends up buying Ren’s cake, and he gracefully ignores the smug smiles from Ren about it, because, after all, he is the birthday boy. 


End file.
